An abandoned home on Mt. Olivet, near Coleman A. Young International Airport, on Detroit's east side. / Jessica J. Trevino/Detroit Free Press

Written by

George Galster

Detroit Free Press guest writer

George Galster

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The Detroit Blight Removal Task Force recently released its report documenting more than 40,000 blighted structures in the city.

Throughout the report and the public briefing accompanying its rollout, the task force referred to blight as a “cancer.” This metaphor is apt in some ways but is fundamentally inappropriate for prescribing a cure for this “disease.” Detroit’s blight is not a result of pathologies present within the body of the city, but rather those operating in the suburbs.

The task force correctly noted that, like a cancer, blight sickens the body politic in a variety of ways. It is also correct that blight should be excised from Detroit as soon as possible, because its elimination is a prerequisite to the city’s quality of life and long-term financial health.

Unfortunately, although a tumor can be removed, blight is an ongoing process that will continue even if all its visible symptoms are temporarily eradicated. The hard truth is that even if we somehow erased, instantaneously, all blight in Detroit tomorrow, a year from now, we would have thousands of newly blighted structures littering the city.

Blight in Detroit is fundamentally the result of processes at work outside of the city’s boundaries. Since 1950, two-thirds of the city’s population has systematically been siphoned off by the region’s housing “disassembly line.” In the tri-county metro area, developers have in every decade since 1950 built many more dwellings — an average of more than 10,000 per year — than the net growth in households required. Developers figured that their new suburban subdivisions could successfully compete against the older housing stock. They were right. As households filled these new dwellings they vacated their previous homes, which other households decided to occupy because they were viewed as superior options to where they were previously living.

As this sequential moving up-and-out process continued, it inevitably vacated the oldest, least-competitive dwellings located in the least-desirable neighborhoods in the region. These places were overwhelmingly located in Detroit. Owners of these perpetually vacant properties could find neither tenants nor buyers. Thus they ceased paying property taxes or maintaining the structures and, eventually, abandoned them. Detroit’s blight is thus fundamentally a symptom of a speculative, uncontrolled residential development process in the suburbs.

To cure Detroit’s blight, Michigan must establish a metropolitan growth boundary, which would prohibit, for a specified period, new development outside of the existing urbanized footprint. This would provide incentives to maintain, improve and rehabilitate older homes and to build new ones on the vacant land located within Detroit’s neighborhoods. Oregon instituted such a strategy in the 1970s, and a successful Portland was the result.

Sadly, the Blight Removal Task Force report is silent on this true cause of the city’s blight. Even if all its recommendations were followed, blight would reappear so long as Michigan’s rules guiding where development is most profitable remain unchanged. By its misuse of the cancer metaphor, the report is setting up the anti-blight effort for failure.